How does AVEVA System Platform handle 700,000 signals in an airport environment?
AVEVA System Platform acts as an industrial operating system that unifies 80 servers spread across five control environments. It integrates multi-vendor equipment through a library of standardized objects and replicable data models. Every PLC, regardless of brand, communicates with System Platform through a common interface. This architecture enables Barcelona-El Prat Airport to supervise the terminal, power plants, baggage handling and ancillary services from a single platform, with the prospect of scaling to nearly one million signals.
Why unify an airport's industrial supervision on a single SCADA platform?
Before AVEVA, Barcelona-El Prat operators had to learn up to 20 different technologies from 15 to 20 integrators, generating stress, high costs and slow incident response. By centralizing industrial supervision through AVEVA System Platform and InTouch HMI, the airport now has a unified real-time view, distributed alarm management and a coordinated incident response. This consolidation makes it possible to manage the infrastructure with only 8 operators during off-peak hours, compared with much larger teams previously.
What role does AVEVA Historian play in a high-availability airport SCADA architecture?
AVEVA Historian centralizes the collection and archiving of real-time data from the 80 System Platform servers. In Barcelona, a dedicated server runs Historian as a repository containing the complete configuration of the entire system. Combined with a redundant architecture (two geographically separate processing centers connected by fiber optics), Historian ensures data continuity even in the event of a failure. Teams use this data for trend monitoring, environmental reporting and continuous process improvement.
What concrete benefits does a standardized AVEVA architecture bring to a major infrastructure project?
The standardized approach of AVEVA System Platform at Barcelona-El Prat avoided duplicated engineering, pre-validated design objects and guaranteed they worked properly. Despite multiple companies working on several simultaneous projects, the airport achieved uniformity, full connectivity and significant savings. The system, which started with 35,000 signals, now handles 700,000 inputs and will grow to nearly one million. This scalability provides long-term investment protection, replicable across the 47 airports managed by AENA.
How does AVEVA InTouch HMI improve critical alarm management in a control room?
AVEVA InTouch HMI gives Barcelona-El Prat operators an intuitive graphical interface that presents information in context for fast interpretation. The solution manages a fire detection system with 30,000 controlled elements, making it possible to locate the start of a fire in two clicks. The distributed alarm filter absorbs and prioritizes thousands of events in a few seconds, avoiding the saturation typical of centralized systems. Combined with video surveillance, InTouch lets operators instantly view incidents and make precise decisions.
